Modification of skill upgrades

The cost of attack damage upgrade was not balanced very good, so we decided to tweak it a little bit. We reduced the cost from 15 levels for 1st upgrade to 10 and the cost from 30 levels for 2nd upgrade to 20. Previously you had to grind a little to obtain the 1st upgrade and the 2nd was almost unreachable. Now the second upgrade is more reachable. 

 In the process of balancing attack damage skill we also implemented max skill upgrade cap. 

The attack damage skill is caped after second upgrade, which doubles the damage. 

The attack speed skill is caped after 30 upgrades which makes you able to fire 4 projectiles per second instead of one projectile per second, which is default with no upgrades. 

The heal speed is caped at 30, which makes you unable to regenerate health faster than two health per second. 

We also increased upgrade value of heal speed skill  from 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. So every heal speed upgrade decreases heal interval by 0.2 seconds.

Increased upgrade value of attack speed skill from 0.05 to 0.1.

Implemented stage counter

To make the game more interesting and to add more sense of a progress for the player we added stage counter. Player progresses to next stage when the time between enemy spawns decreases. This was previously every 25 seconds, but it felt too long so we decreased it to 20 seconds.

Modification of level up curve

We changed level up curve from exponential to linear (so it is more of a level up line now). When the curve was exponential, player gained first few levels very fast and than after some point had to grind quite a bit to obtain new levels. Level progression did not feel very good. So we chose very basic approach, on every level you have to gain 10 exp more than on the previous level, starting from 10 to obtain level 1, 20 exp to obtain level 2 and so on. This game does not have very complicated experience mechanics so this linear approach feels smoother.  

Minor game redesign

We have some minor design modifications as well. We redesigned all buttons in the game. Previously we used default white buttons, which looked a little bit cheap. We wanted to make a transparent buttons with thin white border and white text inside. Unity unfortunately does not offer border modification of buttons (at least we did not found any, if there is an easy way to create borders on buttons please let us know). So we have drawn a button outline in drawing software and imported it as a sprite. 

Then to make it more interesting we added highlight button color for each button. 

Some design changes were made to the main menu too. We removed controls instructions from main menu screen and then we made some font changes to main menu game title.  

We are satisfied with the new look, it makes the menus more stylish (we hope). 

A bit of refactoring

We tried to make all the code changes with a bit of refactoring so we do not feel bad about the state of the code :).